Narco News Reloaded: Help Dan Feder Lead Our News Team for the Coming Months

Dan Returns, Laura del Castillo Rejoins the Team, While I’ll Be Covering a Story on a Different Beat

By Al GiordanoPublisher, Narco News

September 11, 2007

Dear Colleagues,

As we have every September for the past seven years, Narco News will expand its coverage of the stories from Latin America that other media don’t report. In this upcoming season you’ll see greater emphasis on stories from South America and in particular the continued US-funded military intervention known as Plan Colombia.

To lead this coverage, Dan Feder – our webmaster and managing editor from 2002 to 2006 – is coming back to the newsroom, with the continued labor of Webmaster Dave Briones, and Newsroom Coordinator Chris Fee. Dan will be coordinating the network of reporters and co-publishers across the hemisphere. Laura del Castillo will also return to the team, now as managing editor and reporter. With Chris and Dave captaining the tech support, Dan will be able to do more reporting than ever, including an upcoming series of reports from Colombia’s terrible civil war.

The consequences of the multi-billion dollar Plan Colombia adventure – begun by the Clinton Administration in 2000 and continued throughout the Bush presidency – must be put back on the front burner in the country that funds it: the United States. We have the plan in place to do that but, as you know, we’re up against billions of dollars: much of which goes to bolster official propaganda that this aid goes to fight a “war on drugs,” but which has the effect of widespread environmental destruction (through aerial herbicide spraying), the emboldening of paramilitary death squads, the assassination of labor organizers and other social leaders, the corruption of Colombian and US law enforcers in Colombia, and the deterioration of human rights.

With the 2008 presidential and congressional elections upcoming in the United States, now is the time to alert the people there and throughout the world the true facts of that failed and harmful plan: so that the next US administration finally puts a stop to it.

That’s going to take some resources, and so I appeal to you to pitch in, both with your labor as co-publishers and writers, and with your generous donation today to The Fund for Authentic Journalism.

Narco News will continue reporting from Mexico, bottom to top: from Oaxaca and Chiapas to the US border, and we plan to cover the upcoming international indigenous gathering with the Zapatista Other Campaign in the northern state of Sonora in October, as well as regional meetings leading up to it. But we feel that it is urgent to put more sunlight back upon the news from South America as well, from where Feder and del Castillo will be working.

While I will be around to advise and assist Dan and the rest of the team (and will be devoting a good part of the coming months to hunting down the resources to reboot the Narco News School of Authentic Journalism), I’ll also be reporting for some other publications about an important story outside of Narco News’ beat: The US presidential election campaign (which will obviously determine much about what can and will occur in Latin America after the exit of George W. Bush), and, specifically, the primaries beginning next January that will determine the nominees. Via Narco News and the Narcosphere, you’ll be kept informed on where to read my own upcoming reports on that story. But it remains absolutely vital that during these months Narco News continues setting the context of news from Latin America with adherence to the true facts and countering the official spin.

Dan Feder and Laura del Castillo are the right journalists at the right hour to reload Narco News’ coverage, and are coming in with many new ideas and lots of enthusiasm. Dan would love to hear from you directly with your counsel and, of course, your participation in the project. You can reach him at dan@narconews.com.

I’ll still be available to each of you at narconews@gmail.com but it will be Dan captaining the ship day to day. Please give him all your support.

In addition to the reentry of Dan and Laura to the news team, we would like very much to bring one or two other journalists on board, but that will be dependent on your response to this appeal. Please do whatever you can to give Dan and the rest of the team the best possible start. If you do, I know we’ll all be impressed and pleased with the work they’ll be able to do (and I’ll be much like many of you; dependent on them to know what is really happening throughout the hemisphere!)